


our keeping

by kay_cricketed



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, Hospitals, Injury, M/M, Marriage Proposal, people who make decisions that are bad for their health and continued state of living, this is not a happy fic necessarily sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 20:23:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3991555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the years have not been kind to Matt Murdock, and Foggy makes a last-ditch effort to turn the tables.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our keeping

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a request on the kink meme, which asked for Foggy proposing marriage to Matt after years of being in a relationship together. Because they are avocados, everything about it has to hurt.
> 
> The timeline of this is elusive. Is it five years into the future, ten? The framework for the snapshot is up to you.

Matt dreams of houses draped in linen, an entire city shrouded and still. He's hoping that if he can cover enough windows, the people won't see him walking down the street without his mask on. He is late for church. He is listening to the people whisper sad stories inside their living rooms.

He wakes up, and the whispering is outside the hospital room door, lining the corridors. A little girl is reading a tabloid to her grandmother, raising her voice over the rasp of the respirator. A man taps his unopened box of cigarettes on his dinner tray. Someone sits beside Matt, breathing like his lungs are about to collapse. Machines and the buzz of the vending machines and a nurse complaining about her feet hurting and the crinkle of plastic—

The pounding in his head increases. Matt winces and turns his face into the scratchy pillow, which even after wash smells like the last guy who sweated into it. The dream lingers in him like poor stitching, coming apart in splinters of thread.

"We said," he says, the words strung out over gravel. "We said no hospitals."

"You said no hospitals," says Foggy. He sounds a thousand years old, like he's gone through hell and back, and the news is out—no hope can be found. "I didn't say that. You may not be able to feel it, Matt, 'cause your drugs are so good. But you've got a hole in you the size of a quarter."

The drugs are very good. Matt fumbles for his stomach, but all he can sense is a high-pitched intensity of feeling somewhere down there, like someone leaning on a soundless horn. His arms ache. He can barely move. When he licks his lips, the pockmarked cracks hurt his tongue. The memories fall through his fingers as fine-grained as flour, and what he recalls are names and places, the taste of blood in his mouth, the smell of a gun fired. He knows after he was shot, he'd crawled into a pile of soggy boxes in the alley, cocooning himself. He doesn't remember if the man responsible got away walking; he doesn't think so. 

"You called me," Foggy tells him. "You asked me to come get you."

"What about Claire?" asks Matt, picking at his thin blanket.

"Yeah. She wasn't there when I got to you. There wasn't time. You were gonna bleed out."

"But—"

"You could've called her, but you called me instead." Foggy shifts in his chair, plastic cracking under him. He doesn't touch Matt, and it feels wrong after all these years, as if the longer he doesn't the more bereft Matt's skin becomes. "You probably could've squeaked past if you'd just punched the right speed dial in. But you called me." His voice has the ring of something beyond tears in it, choked back and bitter-gone-flat. "What was I supposed to do, huh? I couldn't let you _die_."

Matt's heart trips over itself, frantic and unhappy. "No," he says after a long time. "No, Foggy, of course not."

"Always know it's gonna happen," says Foggy. "Some night. You'll come home fucked up, or not come home at all. You stumble along eventually. I made peace with that, yeah? We've got to be okay on that."

"Foggy—"

"But don't you dare expect me to let you die, you asshole. You called _me_ and you asked _me_ to come take you home—"

"Foggy," says Matt, his eyes burning. He squeezes his eyelids tight against the sting.

"—and you said you was _sorry_ , Matt, you kept trying to tell me how _sorry_ you were, how you'd messed up. Yeah, _yeah_ , you've messed up." Foggy's words crack and falter. He takes a shuddering breath and evens it out. "God. I tried to meditate like you showed me while you were—while you were sleeping—but I can't even get my head out of this crazy loop. Karen left you those flowers on the bedside table."

Matt struggles. "What kind?"

"Smell them and you tell me."

The struggle howls and fails in him, and Matt presses juddering hands over his face. He tries to breathe, and it hurts, all this noise and—how Foggy's heart clamors like an ailing thing, too, just limping.

"I'm sorry," says Foggy, deep and meaningful. "That was a mean thing to say. It was mean, and you're injured, and I'm upset. These things are all connected. But I'm still an asshole for saying it."

Matt shakes his head, because they're always going to have this argument—because it's always going to hurt them. Time has worn him down, weakening his bones, thinning his resolve to be right. Sometimes he wonders if they're both in the same boat at last, understanding the futility, the questions of morality that have no answers—knowing, jointly, that Matt is on a short road to the long sleep, that he could step off that road and only chooses not to—knowing, jointly, that there are no directions left without some darkness in them. They can only stumble forward and try not to tell lies.

Knowing this isn't the same as accepting it. He grapples for Foggy's hand, desperate to hold it, to place him firmly in his mind's eye.

And because Foggy loves him, he gives it to him.

"Matt," he says, pressing his hands together around Matt's, kissing them fiercely. "C'mon, buddy. You have to do something for me here. Give me—something."

Matt curls toward him, ignoring the sudden stab in his side. He touches Foggy's face, feels his hair brush against his wrist. "I don't know what," he says, cleaved into pieces he can't afford to lose. "I just—what? What do you want?"

A pager goes off in the nurse's station. In the hospital room, Foggy crowds into his space and kisses him instead of answering. He hasn't brushed his teeth for at least a day. He tastes like watery coffee and as if he's deliberately bit into a raw onion. It makes Matt flinch and then laugh, aborted, with the shaky relief that he's already been forgiven. He can feel his toes again and someone has put his favorite socks on his feet: thick wool, hole in one heel.

Foggy exhales against him, his weight sagging into the bedside. "I'm going to make Karen partner and kick you out."

"Oh, when did she finish the Bar?"

"She's way smarter than both of us combined. She's better looking than me, and she's less crazy than you. It's a winning combination."

"Okay," says Matt. "Okay, Foggy. Whatever you want."

The soreness begins to recede now that he's quiet and still, the IV digging into his arm probably helping a lot with that. Matt blocks out the smells and noises one by one, savoring the taste of bad coffee over the metallic, medicinal tang that had lingered before. He closes up the world until it's only the room, and Foggy's pulse growing calm, and the soft drip of the solution. Their fingers are locked. More than anything, that convinces Matt to shut his brain up, to stop thinking about how dangerous having his life saved has become, to stop thinking about how he doesn't deserve this, and so many things, so many people.

(He will hold onto them like a sick dog. He will clamp down for as long as they're willing to carry him, for as long as Foggy is able to worry about his socks after he's been in surgery. That long, and longer.)

Foggy sighs wetly. "There is something I want."

Matt waits.

He has to untangle from Matt's grip, but it doesn't take long. A small box claps—velvet on velvet—and Matt's fighting to make a picture out of what he's hearing, even though a part of him already knows, is struck stupid. Foggy takes his hand again and pushes the cold band down his ring finger, forcing it over the swollen knuckle. Even then, it's a little big, because Matt can't remember the last time he didn't have swollen knuckles and _of course_ Foggy knows that, is prepared.

Maybe it's gold. Maybe it's silver. If Matt can get it into his mouth, he'll know.

"What is this?" he asks, and he doesn't know how he said it because everything is numb and ill-shaped.

Foggy strokes his wrist, simply holding on. "You know what this is," he says.

It's heavy and it could split a man's eyelid in two and Matt knows these things, and is ashamed to know these things. "I don't."

"If you're going to be out there dying for our city," says Foggy, "I need to get the good years in while we still have them."

That Foggy believes that—and he does—hurts worse than getting shot. That Matt believes it, too, is the holy water anointing the sickness in him. He wants it to be so much better, for Foggy's sake. He wants to be the easy tumble in bed, the lazy-sweet pace of a normal relationship, and the guaranteed promise. But he's not. He's the son of a bitch who gets shot and goes out to bite bullets again. Matt Murdock is swinging mad and he's still fighting for that peaceful night of sleep.

"Hey, don't make that face," Foggy says. He kisses Matt's hand again, long and lasting, warming the ring. "Just say yes. Say maybe. Think about it, okay? Take it on loan for a while. Take it for a test run."

"Foggy," he says, the shaking back.

"Give me this," Foggy says, so tired his syllables are blurring together. "If you can carry all this shit, you can carry one ounce more. Maybe—maybe—it'll even turn your luck, Murdock."

Matt touches his chest, feels the quake of his blood as it churns in and out of his valves, hears his despair. And buried in that, something robust and living.

It's a horrible idea. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Foggy laughs, and it may be weary but it lifts Matt out of the grave, anyway. "You're not going to kiss me?"

_Luck_ , thinks Matt, and is changed—somewhere small and cornered, changed.

"I dunno," he says, "I'm feeling a little something." 

It's strange, but his hand doesn't feel entirely like his own anymore. Matt wonders if he'll think twice about punching someone in another fortnight. If he'll hesitate before dropping a man from the top of a building. If he'll be drawn home as if on a thread, following some invisible gossamer line to safety, or if nothing will change at all and his guilt will become an albatross dragging itself through the mud. The metal may taste stale.

(It doesn't. The ring fits between his teeth and he worries it so often, he leaves marks. But he carries those marks for a long time, reading them.)


End file.
